Colleen Quen looks through her paintings and illustrations in her home studio. The gown designer shut her SoMa atelier in 2011 after being diagnosed with breast cancer and moved to North Beach, which she loves: "I'm embracing the city - it talks to me here."

With intense color and fluttering energy, a butterfly exhibits a bright and fragile beauty, something gown designer Colleen Quen has long admired.

Her work has been inspired by the butterfly - her gowns often feature vibrant hues, with sleeves or skirts of delicately billowing fabrics - and now, her life is imitating the butterfly as well.

The designer, whose gowns have been worn by Hollywood celebrities and San Francisco socialites alike, shut her atelier in 2011 after being diagnosed with breast cancer.

For the past three years, Quen has cocooned to focus on wellness, eating a vegan diet, undergoing acupuncture and practicing tai chi, qi gong and meditation to reduce stress. She and her husband, industrial designer Rick Lee, downsized from their 8,000-square-foot SoMa abode to a 900-square-foot condominium in North Beach.

There, Quen has undergone a transformation.

Instead of sculpting with fabric, she has turned to painting as a creative outlet and catharsis.

Drawing upon childhood art lessons from her mother, a sculptor, and lessons from Madeline Fu, a master of Chinese brush painting in Marin, with whom Quen has studied since 2008, Quen has created more than 300 works that range from landscapes to whimsical figures to abstracts.

Quen is displaying her new wings to the world in her first art exhibition, "In the Spirit of Fashion," through Sept. 5 at the Thoreau Center's China Brotsky Gallery in the Presidio. The show of 30 watercolors on rice paper was mounted in cooperation with Project5 and the Asian American Women Artists Association.

The works were created in her studio, a light-strewn sun porch on the top floor of her building in North Beach with views of the Transamerica pyramid, SS Peter and Paul's Church, Ghirardelli Square and the Golden Gate Bridge.

"I hear the bells and I start to paint," she said on a recent weekday, standing on a small deck outside the studio, the wind whipping her newly cropped hair.

In SoMa, she said sipping tea, her life was lived indoors.

In contrast, in North Beach, the smell of the bay breeze, the screeching of Telegraph Hill parrots and the sounds of seals barking at Pier 39 make nature and the outdoors part of her daily life.

"I'm embracing the city - it talks to me here. It's almost like when you're up there," she said, referring to her studio, "you're in heaven."

Quen was raised in Alameda. Her mother taught her to draw, and later, to sew. An eye for color, proportion and fabric was instilled at age 5 when her mother, an I. Magnin devotee, first took her to Britex, the famed fabric store, to select material for her clothes.

In high school, Quen's artistic endeavors included music and athletics. She played piano and flute, and ice-skated competitively. But in college, influenced by her father, an electrical engineer, she earned a computer science degree and at her first job, wrote software programs at IBM.